Hello, my name is Teresa Turton and I had the privilege of taking over last week as the new LRC manager. Much as I was very excited about working in such a buzzing, successful school, starting somewhere new is always a daunting experience, however the staff and students have been extremely helpful and welcoming and I already feel at home.My overwhelming first impression is how kind and considerate students are towards each other; I have witnessed several going out of their way, often at the expense of their own study time, to help new students with their homework and using the equipment in school,.  Many Year7 students have written book reviews as their gap task and I am overwhelmed by the high standard, the use of sophisticated vocabulary reflecting the power of reading. I have included a few examples and will display others in the LRC. I am fortunate to have inherited a superb team of student librarians, with whose help I have reorganised all the books to make them easier to locate and moved all the fiction from LRC3 into LRC1 so books are more accessible during lesson times.  I look forward to working with the team in the coming year.

As part of our reorganisation, we will be establishing a library of sixth form resources in LRC3, along with an Adult Fiction section.  If any staff have books they have particularly enjoyed and feel inclined to donate them for others to read, we will gratefully add those to our collection.

To those who would question the value of books, I ask you to consider the following passage that I came across when reading The Librarian of Auschwitz:

“Culture isn’t necessary for the survival of mankind; for that, you only need bread and water.  It’s also true that with bread to eat and water to drink, humans survive; but with only this, humanity dies.   If human beings aren’t deeply moved by beauty, if they don’t close their eyes and activate their imaginations, if they aren’t capable of asking themselves questions and discerning the limits of their ignorance, then they are men or women, but they are not complete persons: Nothing significant distinguishes them from a salmon or a zebra or a musk ox.”

(From the Afterword) The Librarian of Auschwitz,  Antonio Iturbe